OUR TOWN

by Thornton Wilder

Dramaturg

Described by Edward Albee as "the greatest American play ever written", it presents the fictional American town of Grover's Corners between 1901 and 1913 through the everyday lives of its citizens.

PROGRAM NOTE

​​​​​In the script, Thornton Wilder introduces the world of Our Town, with a simple stage direction:

“No curtain. No scenery. The audience, arriving, sees an empty stage in half-light.”

Wilder invites the audience to fill in the empty space around the actors. He purposefully draws attention to the fact that we are watching a play by casting the Stage Manager as a narrator to guide us through the story. This use of metatheatricality—a quality that marks the self-awareness a play and its characters have of the theatrical situation—was somewhat groundbreaking when it premiered on Broadway in 1938.

Since then, the American theatre has produced countless productions the Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece on Broadway, at regional theatres, on university campuses, at high schools and at community theatres nationwide. In a 1975 New York Times article, director Alan Schneider wrote that Thornton Wilder’s plays “have not so much been ‘revived’ over and over again, and in all sorts of places, as they have almost continuously stayed alive among us.” This is particularly true for Our Town. In fact, SCR’s 2022 production will be the theatre’s third staging; the first was in 1971 and the second in 1998.

At first, some critics rolled their eyes at Wilder’s experiment: One reviewer for Commonweal believed the “stunt makes the play more important than it seems.” Others praised they play’s innovative visual sparseness and all-knowing stage manager: “[The] whole effect gives ten times as much ‘theatre’ as conventional scenery could give,” wrote a reviewer for Time magazine.

Yet, while unconventional for the 1930s, the presentational style of the play is an old form, dating back as far as Ancient Greek theatre when the presence of the audience and their shared experience with the actors played a key role in live storytelling, dramatic or comedic. By removing almost all theatrical artifice, Wilder echoes ancient theatrical practice and lays the framework for an eternal story of daily life, love and death in a community of people. Thornton Wilder regarded people and their lives very highly; to him, “We’re all People, before we’re anything else. People, even before we’re artists. The role of being a Person is sufficient to have lived and died for.”

Wilder is interested in more than the humanity of the characters in the story; he’s also interested in the humanity of the People in the audience. Productions of Our Town must do more than tell a story about the citizens from the fictional New Hampshire town of Grover’s Corners from May 7, 1901 to the summer of 1913. Each production of Our Town also has a responsibility to reflect its community. It is the acknowledgement of the portrayal of human relationships, emotions, and lives that allows a community to explore onstage the practice of storytelling. Ultimately, the stripped-down nature of Our Town highlights the shared humanity between the audience and actors—the essence of theatre.